Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Well we have been using netbeans for about 1.5 yrs and we were happy with it. But recently we have started using RubyMine 2.0.1 and must say its what we were looking for. The performance and low memory consumption are two most important criteria that we are taking into account. I will recommend using RubyMine for your rails projects.

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

I would sure love to hear how you got it working... Have tried on multiple times to get a project running with no success

ashif wrote:

Well we have been using netbeans for about 1.5 yrs and we were happy with it. But recently we have started using RubyMine 2.0.1 and must say its what we were looking for. The performance and low memory consumption are two most important criteria that we are taking into account. I will recommend using RubyMine for your rails projects.

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

After trying everything, my opinon is:

#1 Komodo Edit: This is free and all things considered I believe it beats Notepad++ as it does support RHTML syntax.

#2 Notepad++: Even though it doesn't support RHTML, it's free and the plugin support is amazing. It's it's the only text editor for Windows I've tried that when you highlight a word (like a variable or object, etc) will highlight all occurances of that string on the entire page you have open. This comes in very handy to quickly see all instances of something w/o using "find".

#4 EM Text Editor: This one is $10 cheaper than E Text Editor and much better (for example, E Text editor doesn't support zooming, and doesn't have an HTML bar (like a Dreamweaver HTML bar) like EM Text Editor does

#4 GVim (w/ Plugins): The only flaw to this is it has a NASTY learning curve. If you were up for it, your hands would never need to leave the keyboard. I honestly don't have the time to learn some old school program whose power all lies within learning the keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Everything else (and I tried everything) isn't even worth mentioning (and I'm including the $50 E Text Editor). Like InType isn't much better than Notepad and Explorer together. There's not much else feature wise there. I could care less about Macs or Textmate, and after trying E-Text Editor and can't imagine anyone liking it more than some of the other windows options unless they are comming off a Mac. E Text Editor is also one of the only text editors I tried that didn't support zooming. Some people don't care for zooming but I find it invaluable for programming (zoom in when your eyes are tired or your concentrating on something, zoom way out when you're looking for something). Actually Notepad++'s ability to highlight all occurances of a string when you highlight a string and zooming are a really great combo.

Basically, after trying everything, nothing pleases me (everything has some missing feature) and I'm about to buy Rubymine.

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

The pluses about editors like e-texteditor and intype are the macros and snippets. I've tried komodo edit a bit myself, didnt really care for it. I still use e-texteditor at work for various web editing. More and more I'm using redcar editor.

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

I've recently started using Rubymine and have found it excellent. The hallmark of a good IDE is when it does actually improve your code. Rubymine is pretty intelligent about pointing out non-fatal errors, the kind of things that creep in when you do a lot of refactoring like variables declared but not used, or spelling mistakes in strings.

It has really good navigation features, CMD-e opens a list of recent files, shift-cmd-n (navigate) lets you open a file by regex, sorted by recency, hold down cmd and everything becomes a hyperlink so you can jump do a method definition, model, stylesheet, js file, partial, etc. Navigate quickly between a controller method and it's view. If the view doesn't exist, create it automatically.

An excellent debugger lets you set breakpoints anywhere, even in views. Current variables are nicely formatted, hashes can be unfolded, arbitrary code can be executed with cmd-f11.

cmd-r runs rake tasks, and it remembers your last task so if you're running the same task a lot it saves time. You can search within rake results so no more piping to grep if you just want to check a route.

The editing experience for me is comparable to textmate, there are some minor annoyances like the Java based interface, but then some features of textmate annoyed me too.

Overall, I'd suggest you give it a week. If you like it, then buy it...

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

I should also mention the autoformatting. The time I used to spend indenting my CSS and making sure multiline method calls indented properly. You can do a whole directory in a single click and it has pretty much every coding style as an option.